Theia Mania
by NeverMineToHold
Summary: This is how much I love you...


Title: "Theia Mania"

Status: OneShot

Fandom: The Avengers (Movie)

Pairing(s)/Character(s): Loki/Tony Stark

Disclaimer: The Avengers belong to Marvel.

Rating: T

Genre: Alternate Universe – Canon Divergence, post-movie, established relationship, slash, dark

Warnings: (minor) necrophilia, major character death

Summary: This is how much I love you...

Theia Mania

A lifeless body was not so easily carried, weighted more than it should, as if the spirit that had animated it had also made it lighter. His grip tightened around it, he felt cold skin even through his armor, heard the scratch of stubble on leather, missed the rhythmic puff of warmth.

What he did not miss was the chaos in his mind, the screaming, cursing and fighting. Now its surface was still and placid, silky sheen over hidden steel and fire, blank and calm, set to his task, not to be stopped by any force within or without the Nine Realms.

Loki's steps did not falter, not on the crude mountain path with its gaping schisms, winding its way higher and higher to the dagger-like peak, not as the air thinned out to icy needles, prickling raw the insides of his lungs, not with the torrent of wind howling and nipping at his heels.

The cavern was where the legend had promised, ripped words from an unwilling throat, seeping from a lolling tongue like the red carpet spreading at their feet until Loki had let go. The entrance looked like a maw, snarling spikes and shards of weather polished obsidian, mottled with minerals, and darkness beyond.

Magic was heavy in the air, sharp-edged against his senses, like the gentle pressure of a knife set to slit his wrist. Loki met it force by force, cut for cut, a little like dying, feeding his life away, surrounded by a halo of green that crackled and twisted and would not bow, only matched by its reflection in narrowed eyes.

The circle gave way with the exhale of a vacuum released, a ripple like silver in the air, like waves in a pond after the thrown stone had sunken to its bottom. The sound it made was beautiful, like a shattering mirror, a glass half-full, the trumpet on the morning hill, a bard playing on broken strings.

Stepping inside, weaving his way around rock needles, stalactites dripping from above, Loki laid out his dead burden on a bed of stolen magpie feathers. They shimmered green-blue, plucked from tails and cursed for it with hoarse screeching.

He settled down beside it, gently arranging stiff limbs and a lolling head, the skin waxen and sagging over once firm muscles, discolored in places, dark veins a road map for all to see, branching all the way down to a shriveled sex like a worm.

There are worms, coiling through flesh, eating away at it with tiny teeth, playing their part in human decay. Loki's lips curled upward at the thought and he reached down to brush back brittle hair; crumbs of earth fell from it and vanished between the feathers.

He wove the spell with lilting whispers and intent and purpose, allowing desire and emotion to thrum deep within his throat, hands and fingers moving to shape the cave's magic; coaxing and demanding. The air shifted around the body, became heavy, compressed, molecules bound together, to keep nature at bay for the time being.

He will rip apart whoever did this, slowly, cell for cell, but now was not the time. - He has a list of ingredients and sets out to gather them.

XXX

The first thing to be found was life.

Loki found the crone that breathed time at the end of it, in a place without stars, for all was fated to become nothing somewhen down the road of its existence. It was dark like a black hole was dark, the absence of light. He felt her, heard her ragged breath, the whisper of her rotting clothes and cobweb hair, inhaled the stench of her.

"What you have come to reclaim I need not ask, foolish son of Yggradsil's roots," she whispered, a greeting, a warning, an oracles speech. "And yet I wonder, will it be worth it?"

Loki did not answer, only reached for the sound of her voice. His fingers dug deep into clammy and too soft flesh, and pulled her close. Brittle lips met his, and he coaxed them open with a lovers finesse, even though their vileness repulsed him. Her sigh of satisfaction, wrung from a body without neither age nor life, rushed into him.

He did not wait for her cackling to stop, simply turned around and tried to find his way back, arms wrapped tight around his middle, and never stopped shivering, never stopped bleeding, never stopped being torn apart from within.

In exchange for a breath of life, nestled golden in his core, Loki lost the womb that had given birth to his children, the ones he cherished more with each voice raised that called them monsters.

He cared not.

XXX

The second thing to be found was death.

Loki found it in the heart of a swamp within mist, within a giant toad, within a world so tiny she wore it as a pearl around her neck. He played the fool for hundred days, sitting at her feet, eating from her hand, servicing her night and day.

He washed her layers of wobbling fat, brought her mountains of food, prepared to perfection to shame any chef, fell to his knees and crawled before her, head bowed, body a curve of subservience. Kissed her feet with curling black nails and mold and gangrene and whispered to her about love, weaving each lie like a masterpiece.

Hundred days gone by, she handed him the pearl. She knew no words of any kind, only the whip that had flayed his back and sharp demanding gestures, but her giggling made her body jiggle and slap like jelly as she waved him good bye.

Loki broke the pearl open like the shell of an egg, uncaring for the life that escaped with the rushing gust of an atmosphere. He shrunk himself to fit and walked through the swamp with squelching steps, feet sucked deeper and deeper, smoke rising from the soles of his boots where acid tried to dissolve them. On an island in its heart he found the dead toad, long flashy tongue encircling the whole clearing, flesh puckered and festering.

He plucked out its eyes, huge glowing orbs of golden slitted black, and crushed first one and then the other in his bare hand, catching the liquid with a vial of spun fat, shaved from her skin in secret.

In exchange for a toxin so lethal it had to be thrice contained, twice guarded, once hidden and never spoken of, Loki had to sacrifice his dignity with a smile.

He cared not.

XXX

The third thing to be found was immortality.

Loki found it in a familiar place: Idunn's gardens on Asgard's soil.

In exchange for the essence of unending life Loki neither paid nor sacrificed anything. Stealing them was child's play, done often enough, like a well rehearsed line in an never changing play. Come and gone within the blink of an eye, yet each breath a memory of days past.

Perhaps the shadow following him grew deeper still, like the Allfather's hatred and Thor's despair and Frigga's turned away face and the echoes of what was lost, to never be regained nor mended.

He cared not.

XXX

The fourth thing to be found was salt.

Loki found it within himself, after long months of growing despair and towering piles of bodies, the vilest creatures barely good enough for him to vent his frustrations.

But tears were no longer easily shed, had dried up within him long ago, when the last of his children had been ripped right out of his bloodstained arms, cradling the tiny babe to his chest, lips muttering soothing noises.

Loki remembered tasting it, his beautiful boy's lifeblood, gushing from the wound Odin had wrought, remembered his own face, the twitch and pull of sinews and muscles, until he had given the Allfather a smile of compliance; a deranged and sweet thing.

He remembered, all of it, and his heart broke anew. When they finally fell his tears were surely more bitter than salty, but the burning of the dying sun in its scorched sky dyed them golden.

In exchange for the basis of all life Loki had to let go of the future that had never come to pass, leaving one more hole never to be filled.

He cared not.

XXX

The last thing to be found had always been his.

No cold ran deep enough, no ice gleamed like death on frozen lips, like it did on Jotunheim. Loki returned to the plains of desolation, shaped by his own hands through the Bifröst's power, stood amongst the rubble of a kingdom shattered. Its citizens, what was left of them, suddenly so small and wrecked, howled and tore at him like the wind and then scattered before him.

They had not been able to withstand the might of Mjölnir, how could they hope to best Loki in battle?

Blue blood colored his hands even before his skin changed, runic lines running and branching across his face, eyes drowning in crimson, as he became a Frost Giant, albeit a runt by the measure of his kind.

Loki broke off the ice that grew from his hand as natural as breathing came to mammals, the edge sharp and more durable than steel. He sat down in what became a blizzard over the course of the next six hours, chipping away the blue from his skin, shaving down to the bone and marrow.

In exchange for endurance_**,**_ eternal ice, never yielding, Loki had to rid himself of his heritage. And while his flesh regrew on his bloody carcass he felt the cold for the first time.

He cared not.

XXX

All that was left was for the body to be prepared.

Caressing cold skin, the tip of a nose, the lines of cheekbones and chin, soft eyelids over sunken hollows and lips that had once shaped words of witty repartee and science and love, Loki prepared himself for what needed to be done; fingertips aching with memories he held dear.

The ribcage broke open under the force of his hands with the sound of snapping twigs and squelching mud. The Arc reactor he discarded with a hollow thunk on stone, silver and wet with blood and ichor, and beyond that a thin layer of dead flesh and white fat. The smell rose up to the stalactites, sickly sweet, from the gaping wound, filled with mucus and the gleam of rotten, dark organs.

Loki did not spare a glance for the ruptured heart, torn by shrapnel, their glint wicked. Three ribs had been broken, like shards they poked up, moist and shiny, like ivory, and just so to the touch. He fit them back together, using his own hair and magic like wires, and the spell would do the rest.

Death he had swallowed two hours ago. One later, the juice of Idunn's apples. It had been as sweet as always, while his tears were truly salty, and his Jotunblood cold and bitter. The vapor of it all would be expelled, its composition broken down and changed and morphed within Loki.

He leant close to the hole in Tony Stark's chest cavity, crawling over him, covering his nakedness, lips brushing raw flesh and exhaled, from deep within. A golden wisp rushed forth, the breath of life released, its particles spreading out, settling everywhere like fairy dust.

The magic worked its way, knitting flesh and skin back together, the garish wound closing. Now Loki had to sit and wait, bear witness to the spell taking hold or how it evaporated, everything done could vanish without a trace.

He cared not.

_Everything_ for the reward he sought.

XXX

Coming back to himself after hours and days and weeks and months, looking at the dust that had once been a cave atop a mountain, Loki realized: he had cared far too much.

The trumpet on the morning hill was as clear as a bell, heard in all Nine Realms, echoing through and past them as a warning: Ragnarok is here.

(Loki cared not.)

The End

R&R


End file.
